Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/46

 this increase in the feeling of strength. They know that the giant is not dangerous to them so long as he is not conscious of his own strength. To keep down this feeling of strength is their greatest care, even material concessions are much less hated by them than moral victories of the working class, which increase its self-confidence. Therefore they often fight much harder to maintain autocratic management of the factory, to maintain the right to "run their own business," than against increases in wages. This explains the bitter enmity to the celebration of Mayday as a holiday taken by labor, and also explains the efforts to throttle universal and equal suffrage wherever it has become a means of visibly demonstrating to the population the continuous victorious advance of the Socialist party. It is not the fear of a Socialist majority that drives them to such efforts—they need not fear that for many an election.

No, it is the fear that the continual electoral victories of the Socialists will give the proletariat such a feeling of strength, and so overawe its opponents that it will be impossible to prevent the seizure of the powers of the state and the transformation of the relation of powers in the government.

Consequently we must be prepared to see our next great electoral victory followed by an attack on the present suffrage law for the Reichstag elections—by which I do not by any means say that this attack will be successful.

To be sure, our party does not have victories alone to record, but defeats as well. But the discouraging effect of these is lessened just in proportion as we turn our attention from the local and momentary limitations to follow our movement as a whole during the last two generations in all the nations of the world. The continuous and rapid advance of the whole proletariat, in spite of very heavy individual defeats, then becomes so notorious